Extracts from STANDING AGAIN AT SINAI. HarperSanFrancisco, USA.

Within a social system in which the physical environment continues to be shaped to free men for "productive" work while women perform support services in the home, women can take on traditionally male roles only if they remain childless, have extraordinary energy, or pay someone else to act as housekeeper and child-tender.

The ways in which male God-language continues to legitimate male authority are difficult to demonstrate, for this language has become so familiar, it is simply taken for granted.

What in Judeo-Christian tradition is ours? What can we claim that has not also wounded us?

Over time we learn to insert ourselves into silences. Speaking about Abraham, telling of the great events at Sinai, we do not look for ourselves in the narratives but assume our presence, peopling the gaps in the text with women's shadowy forms.

The great silence that has shrouded women's history testifies not to women's lack of historical agency but to the androcentric bias that has shaped historical writing.

... to image God as male is to value the quality and those who have it. It is to define God in the image of the normative community and to bless men - but not women - with a central attribute of God.

The maleness of God calls for the silence of women as shapers of the holy ...

Feminism ... demands we replace a normative male voice with a chorus of divergent voices ...

The consistent goal of feminist writing ... has been to undercut dualisms, to find a way through and beyond the either/or thinking (either spirit or body, either virgin or whore) so central to western attitudes towards sexuality.